


where the winds of limbo roar

by TaleWorthTelling



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers Has PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-17 02:51:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11266404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling
Summary: This work is a continuation of the story begun indon't let these shakes go on.This is Steve's story.





	where the winds of limbo roar

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [don't let these shakes go on](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1729376) by [TaleWorthTelling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling). 



> This was mostly written three years ago, but I wanted to finally properly connect it to its parent fic (partially because I've had requests, so I hope there's still interest). There are far fewer **warnings** for this story compared to "shakes", but: there is some minor violence, discussion of implied sexual assault (an assumption that, if you remember from "shakes", Bucky never corrected him about -- at least, hadn't yet), and Steve is not in a good place mentally in this story. It's not as heavy as "shakes", but it is heavy, even though it does get lighter. But basically, this fic exists because, after requests for a sequel that I wasn't sure I could write, I realized that Steve did have his own stuff going on that "don't let these shakes go on" wasn't in a position to address. It's listed under "inspired by" because I still feel that "shakes" stands well on its own and I don't consider this a direct sequel.
> 
> This is Steve's parallel story of coming to terms and rediscovering who he is initially through the lens of Bucky's recovery and later without it, and much like Steve was rarely seen but a keenly felt presence in "shakes", Bucky's effect on Steve is practically its own character here as well, so it informs that. 
> 
> Thank you for all of the wonderful comments, flattering recommendations, and continued inquiries on a fic that is now several years old and remains close to my heart. I'm still amazed at both the response and the continued interest, and I hope this story fills in some blanks and, eventually, offers some closure for the world in which "shakes" takes place: a world which is built on a very specific idea that I wanted to fully explore.

The kitchen is spotless. Steve is a clean guy and he doesn’t cook much anyway, but there’s usually a little evidence of life: a pan that he washed and left on the stove instead of putting away, maybe a little dust over the fridge. Bucky has been cleaning again.  
  
There’s a very faint trace of burned coffee in the air, almost gone, and the window is wide open, chilling the apartment. Steve crosses the small room in two strides and carefully slides it closed. He looks outside at the gray, melting snow as it shuts with a dull thump.  
  
Bucky isn’t in the apartment. He knows that before he even calls out for him, before he looks around to find it empty. He has finely-honed situational awareness, but more than that is his simple barometer for Bucky’s presence or lack thereof.  
  
Bucky isn’t near. He mentally goes over Bucky’s schedule and none of his appointments or senior center visits line up with today at this hour. He’s gone off somewhere for one of his walks, then. Whether it’s of the “I needed something from the corner store” variety, or the “I’m just exploring and feeling out the world,” or the “leavemealoneleavemealonewhatisthisleavemealone” kind … Steve won’t know until Bucky comes back.  
  
Steve worries about Bucky, but it’s more like breathing than an actual ache right now. He imagines that this is what Bucky felt like for years, not having specific things to tie his apprehension to, not wanting to bruise Steve’s ego and risk his ire by admitting how much Steve scared him sometimes. Steve is slowly learning to choose his battles.  
  
That’s not to say that he doesn’t examine the windowsill, inside and out, for blood, or any sign of tampering, and then carry that examination throughout the apartment. He does. But that might have less to do with Bucky and more with the nightmares that slither through his skull, clawing restlessly at the back of his mind during the day and furiously at night, alone in the dark.  
  
Steve sighs. Bucky can take care of himself, when it comes down to it. Maybe he won’t always remember to eat, maybe sometimes he forgets what he’s trying to say, but he can protect himself. And he’ll come back, of that Steve’s sure.  
  
He looks at the stack of meals that Sam had helped him cook, wrap, and freeze one free Saturday (in exchange for an evening that involved beer and Sam introducing him as his sidekick to everyone in the bar). He thinks about throwing one into the oven.  
  
He picks up the phone and invites Sam over for takeout instead. Sam is just finishing up at work when he calls. Normally he ends his workdays focused and strangely energized, not letting the stress show until he’s home and he’s had time to reflect and refocus the energy in a constructive way, but he sounds unusually drained already. Sam has rough days, too.  
  
Steve queues up the “Sam’s drug-free cloudgasm” playlist and pokes through the menus in the drawer until he finds the one for that Indian place that Sam likes, the one where they remember him by name and the little old Tamil woman who runs the place comes out from the back to pat his cheeks and ask why she can’t find a man like him. It always cheers Sam up.  
  
Bucky doesn’t show up until well after Sam’s stuffed himself too full to move and lays on the couch bemoaning his lack of super-soldier metabolism. His cheeks are flushed from the cold and there’s a thin sliver of light frost on the metal arm where the cuff of his jacket doesn’t cover his wrist. His gaze remains distractedly on the floor, brows knitted together. He barely acknowledges them as he walks to his room, only raising his hand slightly in a half-wave when Sam says, “Hey, man,” and continues on his way.  
  
Sam doesn’t seem put off. Steve acts unaffected, but Sam senses his unease anyway. “He’s just thinking hard. He’ll find his voice.” He yawns, stretching out with both arms above his head and his feet hanging over the armrest, sockless toes wiggling. “You’ll know when he needs you. It’ll feel different. Just ‘cause he’s wanderin’, doesn’t mean he’s lost.”

* * *

 

Steve likes the senior center, jokes be damned. He’s had many and varied fascinating conversations and it means a lot to him to be able to make people smile, and these people especially see him as a human being. He’s happy to stop by.  
  
He’d be lying, though, if he said that it didn’t make him uncomfortable how familiar Bucky’s gotten with the place, how much he seems to feel like he belongs here, how he identifies with them. Steve is from their generation and culturally they have several points of commonality – they even share nostalgia for a few of the same things, though certainly not all, fresh in Steve’s mind as it all is, and sometimes laugh heartily about the things that they don’t miss – but at the end of the day, when he leaves, Steve isn’t even thirty years old. He can do the math, he can live with the teasing, but even though he feels aged beyond his years, he has never felt old, never looked back on his life the way they sometimes do when they tell him stories.  
  
In some ways Bucky has more life experience than he does, than a lot of people do. He lived many lives, across generations, between … freezings; putting on a new face for new crimes against new people, sometimes at the behest of new leaders. And he aged in that time, while Steve slept, but none of those were living. Really living.  
  
He wonders if Bucky looks at them and imagines how his life could have gone. If he sees the grandkids visiting Grandpa and thinks, ‘Those could be mine. I could have had that.’ Steve doesn’t get that feeling. It’s difficult for him to imagine a future he could have had when, as far he can tell, he went from 1945 to 2011 with no recollection in between. It’s almost as if those decades never happened, no matter the proof that they clearly did for everyone else. It’s not a disconnect he thinks he’ll ever be able to completely shake, that split-second when he second-guesses himself. He’s adjusted as best he can.  
  
Even if he had never crashed, he still wouldn’t have had this. Twenty-nine, young as it is in a place like this, is still older than he’d ever thought he would be. He’d never held out much hope for longevity, and it never bothered him as much as Bucky thought that it should. They’d had fights over this, long and ugly, with Bucky claiming that Steve was looking for things that he wasn’t, that he didn’t care, that he ran on fumes, and Steve never really sure how to convince Bucky that being a pragmatist wasn’t the same as wanting to die. Anyway, he hadn’t even thought about settling down and having kids. It hadn’t felt like a possibility and that hadn’t bothered him as much as Bucky thought it should either. He’d just never wanted it much. It was something that Bucky had wanted, though.  
  
He wishes he had taken more time to pull Bucky aside and soothe him, back when it would have mattered. He wishes he had been straight with him, had laid out all of the fault lines in his head and told him what bubbled up through the cracks. If only he could have listened to Bucky just once instead of telling him, “Buck, it’ll be fine.” The reservoir of regret that he tends for Bucky is filled to the brim with stresses he caused knowingly and unknowingly, and he’d take it all back if he could.  
  
But he can’t. He can only try to help the man Bucky’s become, this new person. Regret won’t help anyone.  
  
It sure does linger, though; a sticky residue that clings when he thinks he’s washed it away, a film that never quite scrubs off.

* * *

When Steve viciously yanks his shield out of a downed, sparking robot, grunting with the effort because it was wedged so firmly, he does not expect to turn around and be faced with Sam Wilson, Natasha Romanoff, and Clint Barton all looking at him with varying degrees of concern. The battle is over, but that doesn’t mean they have time to just stand around. There’s casualty evaluation, police coordination, damages to assess, and sometimes they help with clean-up when they can. There’s work to be done.  
  
“What?” he bites out. He’s trying to not be harsh, but it comes out that way anyway. He almost slides his shield back onto his arm, feeling naked and vulnerable for a brief, confusing moment, but he puts it on his back and hears the magnets clink satisfyingly on the metal when they cling.  
  
“You okay?” Sam asks, eyebrows drawn together. He’s reaching a hand out for Steve, offering support, or maybe just hoping that a physical connection from Steve to him will ground out whatever is burning under his skin. Sam is a physical guy; it might just be for his peace of mind.  
  
Steve shuffles closer so Sam can lay a hand on his good shoulder; the other took a bad hit from ricocheting debris and it’s already swollen and stiff.  
  
Sam relaxes a little, clearly relieved at being allowed physical contact (relieved because it comforts him, relieved because maybe Steve’s not as bad off as he feared), and Steve must be the biggest jerk in the world. He hates worrying Sam, and it’s not an easy thing to do. He must really look terrible right now.  
  
He’s okay, though, really, and he opens his mouth to say so, but what he does is shake his head slowly, looking at the rubble surrounding them. “I should go find the ranking officer on scene.”  
  
He turns to leave, but Sam’s grip tightens. “Steve, man, you scared everyone tonight. You scared me. I’m being honest with you.” He looks meaningfully at the sputtering machinery that Steve had almost bisected with his shield and crushed with blows borne from anger.  
  
“I’ll be okay,” he says, deflating, looking Sam in the eye. He reaches out to give Sam’s shoulder a quick squeeze. “I just … had kind of a shock, before we got here. It shook me.”  
  
He’s ashamed. Taking his anger out on homicidal robots is one thing, but what if these had been people tonight? Most of the adversaries he faces are sentient. What if tonight hadn’t been robots? Would he have held back at all? Would he have killed indiscriminately? Would he have ignored pleas for mercy and continued thrashing?  
  
He doesn’t like to think so. But, then, his shoulder had happened because he was furious to the point of distraction and hadn’t pivoted when he should have. If he can get hurt because of his carelessness, then surely he can hurt others. He’s killed before – he’s a soldier, not decoration, not a pacifist – but the idea that he could kill in anger, just as a convenient way to get out his own frustrations …  
  
He feels sick. He looks down at his hands, flexing them, and he’s afraid. He has no problem putting fear into his enemies, knows he can be awfully scary when he wants to be, and he sure as hell hopes that when they see him coming at them they have second thoughts. But, God, the way his friends look at him right now … He never wants them to look at him that way again.  
  
But it’s Bucky’s business. He can’t go gossiping about something that Bucky’s clearly reluctant to talk about just because he reacted poorly. It’s not Bucky’s fault. Bucky’s been trying to cool his head for years.  
  
Was, anyway. He used to. He hasn’t really seen Steve angry in a long time; Steve has made sure to keep it to himself. Bucky doesn’t need to see that.  
  
“What kind of a shock?” Sam is steering them off to the side, wiping sweat and soot from his forehead and adjusting the straps of his wings. His vertebrae pop a little, shifting as he stretches, and he sighs.  
  
Steve doesn’t get comfortable. He’s almost at parade rest, back stiff.  
  
Sam tugs him down to sit on what’s left of the sidewalk. Like he’s said on many occasions, he has patience for many things, but not Steve’s martyrdom.  
  
“It’s not really mine to discuss.”  
  
“Ah. So it’s a Bucky thing.”  
  
Steve shoots him a dirty look, mouth set in a firm line, but Sam is unfazed.  
  
“Listen, if it’s about what I think it is … it means that he’s getting help. It means that he thinks he’s worthy of being helped, that he wants to be better and feel good about himself. So look at it that way and remember…” He turns to look at Steve very seriously. “Remember, Steve, no matter how much it hurts, this is not about you. I know you know that. But I tell myself that all the time anyway, just to make sure I know it.”  
  
“So you know.” It’s not accusatory. That Bucky seeks Sam out over Steve is actually a relief sometimes, because then Steve can be sure that it isn’t out of obligation or lack of options. But it’s still jarring occasionally. Like now.  
  
“Yeah, I think so. Believe me, he’s working on it. And remember, don’t take that pain home to him.”  
  
“I know,” Steve assures. He does. It’s certainly not Bucky’s fault that some people are evil – God, he’s the last person at fault for what was done to him – and it’s not his fault that Steve hadn’t realized, so it’s not his responsibility to comfort Steve just because he wants to go back in time and strangle the smug grins off of Hydra’s murderous, pervert faces.  
  
Steve understands evil a lot better than people assume, naïve as they think he is, and a lot better than he’s comfortable with, actually. He wishes that he understood it less. He’s not often surprised by the ways people hurt each other or the reasons why they do it.  
  
He also knows where the water’s edge of his comprehension goes, and he can only just barely dip his toes into the evil that was done to Bucky. That he could have been used for entertainment, too, is one damn toe over the line. He’s lost. He can’t wrap his mind around it, not because of the way that Bucky was hurt, but of why someone would see him in that state and _want_ to do that to him.  
  
He can feel the anger simmering up from his feet, washing up over his chest, swirling behind his eyes. His face darkens again.  
  
“Whoa, whoa,” Sam says. He looks around. “Look, Nat seems to have things under control. We kept the damage pretty reined in to just a couple of blocks. I don’t think they’ll miss us tonight. Buy me a beer?”  
  
So Steve buys Sam a beer, and then another, and then one more (which he ends up trading halfway through for water, because going out drinking after three hours of adrenaline is a terrible idea), and he’s persuaded by Clint, who turns up an hour later, to have one himself. The bartender gives Steve a towel full of ice for his shoulder. They talk about the new community center that Sam is trying to get funding for. Steve offers to design promotional materials and help get the word out. They do not talk about Bucky.  
  
When Steve gets home, Bucky is still on the couch where Steve left him. He cocks his head to the side when Steve walks in, looks at him from the corner of his eye, but he doesn’t turn or look up. Steve hums a tired hello, drags himself into the shower, and falls into bed, but he doesn’t sleep.  
  
After an hour, he turns on his laptop and researches. He remembers the names on the pamphlets, that some of them were for specific programs, but he feels that would be invasive to look up, so he sticks to generalities. He wants to know what it’s okay for him to do and what’s not okay.  
  
The reasonable solution is to ask Bucky. Just because the Internet tells him that something is true doesn’t mean that Bucky will find it helpful. But he’s not sure where to start with him, or if he should start at all, or if he should let it lie.  
  
By the time the sky is pink with the rising sun and Steve’s finally on the edge of exhaustion, he decides that the only thing he can do is follow Bucky’s lead and see what his cues tell him. He’s out of his depth.  
  
He’s waiting for Bucky to throw him a line.

* * *

 

Steve remembers when touching Bucky hadn’t required any thought. He was an affectionate guy, he’d gotten Steve out of his shell, and coming up behind him to sling an arm over his shoulders or around his waist was nothing. (It was everything.) They’d stopped that, sneaking up on each other, after the factory. No one needed to tell Steve what kind of a thoughtlessly cruel move that would be, and Bucky lost the desire to do it to him. After a while in combat, he became grateful.

 

None of that had required too much change in their relationship. There were things that they no longer did, things that Steve was careful not to say, but Bucky was still the James Barnes that he’d grown up with, and the slight reconfigurations hadn’t fazed Steve. They adjusted. Bucky leaned, he leaned back. Just the way they’d always been, with a few new scars.

 

Even when Bucky woke up screaming, hiding his face in the dirt in shame, biting his lip against sobs that he angrily held back, Steve never questioned where his place was or what he should do. He was there for Buck when he needed it, gave him space when he needed that.

 

Now he’s not sure about that. At the time he had thought that he was doing the right thing, that he was helping, and it had seemed like Bucky responded to it, that he was getting better at least as much as he could in the middle of a war. They were both struggling. No one was themselves. No one stayed the same.

 

But now he wonders if he’d pushed Bucky, if he’d been selfish in offering him a spot on the team. He hadn’t pressured Bucky into joining up, but he can see his error now: if he gave Bucky the chance then of course he wouldn’t pass up his self-assigned duty to watch out for Steve. He wonders if he’d left him alone when he’d needed the company, thrown him out on missions when he’d needed the quiet.

 

Maybe Bucky hadn’t been okay back then either, only Steve was too driven to notice. Maybe Steve was too combat-weary to see it in Bucky. And if Bucky had been worn out, what if the men under his command had been struggling and he had ignored them, too, completely ignorant of their pain?

 

It’s enough to completely undo him.

 

He spends all night at the gym beating the equipment and swinging from the bars, trying to soothe himself with the repetition and rhythm.

 

He considers the possibility that he’s failed more people than Bucky alone.

 

When the call comes after two days of twisting himself up in knots, he’s almost pitiably grateful, glad for the chance to watch his teammates’ backs. And he finds this unsettling, this eagerness to jump into battle and throw himself into the uniform.

 

But he’s still grateful.

* * *

 

Steve has a box of art supplies that he rarely takes out of the closet. One day he finds it sitting out on an end table, open and packed differently from how he’d left it. He pokes through it a bit, curious to see what Bucky was after, and the only disturbed package seems to be the thick markers he keeps around for Sam’s outreach work – not the fancy kind, but the cheaper, heavy-duty kind.  
  
He takes it as an offering, as a sign. Maybe Bucky is telling him to draw. It’s not as direct as he would have been way back when, but it’s hardly a new direction.

 

Bucky used to ask him to draw dirty pictures. Steve had surprised him once for his birthday by presenting him with a risqué flipbook in full color. It had taken him more than six months to gather the time, money, and materials to draw it, especially considering he couldn’t draw it in front of Bucky. Bucky had blushed despite himself and laughed ‘til he cried. The Smithsonian invited Steve to take a tour behind the scenes at the museum and view the “artifacts” deemed too personal, irrelevant, or inappropriate for the public exhibits. (Things that didn’t support his public image, really.) There, in a humidity and temperature-controlled room, nestled among old checkbooks and boxes of yellowed and brittle rolling papers, was the flipbook, preserved with Bucky’s things for all these years. They haven’t recognized it as his work and are thinking of loaning it to an early 1900’s erotica exhibit on the west coast.

 

Of course no one would look at old porn (because they keep calling it art, pretty as it was, but it was as dirty as they came) and ask Captain America whether it was his doing. Even the most avant-garde historian has a line. Steve is it. They were clearly fascinated by the thing, but none of them quite looked him in the eye when it came up and they skirted the subject pretty quickly.

 

They offered him anything that he wanted to keep, but it wasn’t his. Anyway, he thought that if he began to treat it all as history, maybe it would feel like history one day.

 

Another lie he’d told himself.

 

He’s not telling it anymore.

 

He can’t remember drawing anything lately, so it must have been a while ago that he last picked up a simple pencil and roughed out a sketch. He has some time. He grabs a stick of charcoal and a half-heartedly used sketchbook and settles himself by the window, legs crossed and book on his knee.

 

He breathes deeply, eyes closed, and lays the sharpened tip of the charcoal to the thick paper.

 

Thirty minutes later, eyes narrow and focused, he realizes that the drawing he’d begun as a body study, muscle on bone caged in tendons and ligaments and wrapped in skin, has gone from a tasteful nude representation of the human form … to a pretty racy love scene.

 

He pauses, tapping the blunted end of the stick against the edge of the paper, a dull rattling thud that leaves gray smears like ash raining down on the lovers.

 

He keeps drawing.

 

He’s thinking of giving it to Bucky, who’d always loved his drawings and encouraged him with an enthusiasm matched only by his mother (who he would never have shown a drawing like this, no matter how progressive she was, even though she probably would have liked it). Bucky liked all of his work, but he’d always reserved a special fondness for any scene that depicted human nature, any sketch of a face that showed someone’s thoughts, especially ones they’d rather keep private.

 

Maybe Bucky wouldn’t appreciate that kind of raw, naked honesty these days, especially the hidden, unintended kind.

 

Shit.

 

He thinks about the pamphlets again, the ones that he’s almost managed to put out of mind, and looks down at the straining muscles and sinew of the thigh he’s been shading. Above it the two amorously embrace. It’s beyond suggestive: it’s explicit. He can call it art, but it’s only a shade classier than what he would have drawn on request for the boys in the neighborhood or in the Army.

 

Is that too much? Will it make Bucky uncomfortable?

 

He stares at the page for long minutes before he strikes it all through with the charcoal. He smears the big black X with the side of his hand until all you can see of the pair are bits and pieces, unfinished and unsatisfied.

 

He carefully packs away his supplies and puts the box back in the closet. There are smears on the box, and when he tries to wipe them off, they only rub in deeper.

 

He sighs and closes the door so he can go wash his hands. Then he grabs his jacket and keys.

* * *

 

It’s the end of a tiring day when Steve lets himself into his apartment and happens upon Bucky reading at the table, piles of books spread out around him, some cracked open and others clearly yet to be perused. He’s spent most of today on planes after a mission that had lasted one day and two nights and required several long hikes through unwelcoming terrain, and every muscle in his body hurts. He hasn’t slept since before the mission. He’s more or less dragging himself around, really.

  
  
Still, he doesn’t like to ignore Bucky if he can help it.

 

He skims the page of the book that Bucky has open, and much as he agrees with the sentiment in this particular section, he remembers this book and privately doesn’t think much of it. It had been more than a little dismissive of Jim and Gabe, not to mention its thinly-hidden disinterest in Dernier and Falsworth. The title is misleading.

 

“I dunno about that one, Buck,“ he says, keeping his tone light. "Sometimes I think the American historians get a little too caught up in it all. I read a pretty good French one. Lots of emphasis on the boys instead of me. Although it made me realize my French never quite made it up to Gabe’s level. Made me miss Jacques.”

 

He doesn’t own any of them, doesn’t want to be surrounded by monuments to himself or his legacy, but they can get them from the library, if Bucky’s interested.

 

Bucky makes a gruff noise in response and Steve figures that for a no. That’s okay. He waits another couple of beats, just in case Bucky is thinking and needs a moment to say something instead of just ignoring him, but he sighs when the situation resolves itself into the latter.

 

He leaves, back protesting and stiff. He’d been thrown into a hangar bay. Through the closed hangar door. His head is still ringing a little.

 

He showers on autopilot, perfunctory but soothing in its ritual. The water feels good. When he walks back to his room, towel slung around his waist, he passes the archway into the kitchen and sees Bucky staring at the cover of the closed book, hand in his pocket.

 

He dresses for bed and hears Bucky follow suit soon after.

 

He sleeps like a rock, a good fortune for which he’s always grateful. When he wakes early the next morning, before dawn but late enough to feel like he’s rested at least a little, he looks into Bucky’s room and sees him tapping out a beat on the windowsill, one foot on the floor. He’s on top of the covers that clearly haven’t been slept in.

 

The books are still in the kitchen, but they’ve been moved to the corner, neatly stacked.

 

Steve pulls out the ingredients for pancakes. Bucky doesn’t remember that they used to be his favorite, and he’s asked Steve not to tell him which things used to make him happy, but they seem to relax some part of him just a little, even still, every time Steve makes them after a rough night. It’s his wordless offering.

 

Bucky accepts a plateful when he comes out around sunrise. He performs the same ritual he’s done every time Steve’s made pancakes: he assembles every topping and condiment that might look tasty on pancakes and then choose which one he’s going to try today. This time he goes for orange marmalade. Steve tries it, too.

 

He smiles watching Bucky. Sometimes the simple pleasures really do make the background noise quiet for a few minutes.

* * *

 

There’s a new mark on Bucky’s calendar two days a week. There’s no writing. The whole box is scribbled in with black marker. Either it’s something that Bucky doesn’t want him to see, something that Bucky doesn’t want to think about, or something that leaves Bucky in such a state that he knows he won’t need to write in anything else for the rest of the day because he’ll be spending it calming himself down. That’s happened before.

 

Steve is curious and a little wary, but he’s not overly concerned. It means that Bucky is coping, that he’s thinking ahead, that he’s trying to take care of himself in the best way that he knows how. Natasha tells him that these are all good things, and it makes sense.

 

When Bucky heads out on those days, Steve slips mint candies into the pocket of his jacket. Not because he used to like them way back when, but because he’s discovered on his own that he likes them now. It’s the same trick that Steve has picked up, if he’s being honest: the mint is sharp and cool on his tongue, spreading like fire when he sucks hard, and it’s enough to draw him back from the edge of whatever flashback he’s standing on the precipice of, whatever stress that’s turned into a high-pitch whine in his head. Like looking down from the rocky, crumbling edge of a cliff and taking a long step back, it centers him with its intensity. It’s not an observation he shares with others.

 

Still, he strongly suspects that Bucky likes them for the same reason. (He’d liked them as a kid, too, whether he remembers or not.) Steve thinks of these days privately as his Black Days, and figures that obliterating an entire space on the calendar suggests that one might be in need of a little cool mint lifeline.

 

Bucky never says anything about where he goes or what he thinks when he reaches into his pocket and finds the little wrappers crinkling against his fingers, but he doesn’t ask Steve to stop and he smells sweetly minty-fresh when he slinks back in hours later.

 

Steve never asks what the Black Days are about, but gradually the angry black lines take up less space in the square, look less furious, fill him with less despair to look at, until finally all those days read are “Noon: Center” and “9AM: Center”.

 

He doesn’t know where this Center is or who works there, but Bucky has looked him in the eye four times this week, and he even smiles once. Steve could kiss every last one of them.

* * *

 

Steve’s not totally oblivious. He knows that Bucky pulls away from him, but he holds out hope that if he can just make Bucky comfortable, if he can become some version of himself who sets Bucky at ease, then maybe things will be better. He’s always sets high goals. It’s how he’s made.

 

And if that shakes loose a latent memory or two, that would be nice, but Bucky doesn’t need to remember him to earn his love. Steve would reach into his chest and pluck out his still-beating heart if Bucky only hinted that it would make him happy. Love he has to spare.

 

Steve’s been remembering lately, with vivid clarity and stomach-clenching irony, the night when Bucky had gotten drunk on bartered gin and curled himself into Steve’s side, tucked under Steve’s skinny shoulder where he clearly didn’t fit (determined to make himself fit). They’d sat on a rooftop and shivered in the chill until Bucky was too far gone to even feel it, and Steve drank in only the heat rising up in waves off of Bucky’s flushed skin. Bucky mumbled into Steve’s shirt, his mouth leaving a warm damp spot on his side that Steve felt all the way to the bone, weather be damned.

 

“Steve,” he’d said, “Steeeve. Don’t get sick anymore. Just don’t do it. I can’t take it if you get sick again. Honest, I couldn’t stand it.”

 

Steve didn’t know what to say, so he jostled Bucky a little and tightened his arm around him. “I haven’t been sick in a long time, Buck. I do okay. Where’s this coming from?”

 

Bucky looked up at him with big doe eyes, honest like the drawings he loved, and Steve was sure that Bucky wouldn’t feel the same about them if Steve sketched the face he made that night. “This guy at work died. Just kicked it, sudden as anything. Fine one day, buried next week.”

 

“Still not seeing it.”

 

Bucky put his face back down and nosed into Steve’s shirt again, breath still hot and humid. He wrapped his arms around Steve’s waist and interlocked his fingers over Steve’s bony hip until Steve was sure that you couldn’t pry him off with a crowbar. Steve rubbed his back while he waited for Bucky to respond. He wasn’t normally a sappy, sad drunk. Steve was the maudlin drunk.

 

“I saw his wife to make sure she was okay. She said he didn’t recognize her by the end. Just looked at her, blank as anything. Tried to hit her when she touched him, couldn’t lift his own damn arms.”

 

Steve stiffened. He was on strange ground here. On the one hand, he’d been the sick one, so he should have some say in how the conversation went. On the other hand … well, he didn’t really remember being sick. Oh, sure, there was plenty that stuck, plenty misery he could recall, plenty of experiences upon which to draw, but he tended toward fevers, and fevers made him strange, and the end result was often that Steve was not the only sufferer of his illnesses.

 

After Ma died, it was really just Bucky who cared enough to wait out the episodes, which didn’t happen as often as it sometimes felt like they did. He’d wake up, clammy but cool, to find Bucky slumped over his bed holding his hand.

 

“I just looked at her, all broken and sad, pretty thing like her, and I … fucking started crying. What the fuck is wrong with me?” He sighed, long and shaky. White mist trailed out from his lips as he turned his face away from Steve into the open air. “She hugged me and then she started crying and there we are standing there in her kitchen surrounded by condolence casseroles, hugging, sobbing our brains out. I made her some tea and made sure she’d call her sister out on Brighton Beach and then I got out of there.

 

"I just … Steve, all I could think of was that time you were feverish for almost a whole week straight, and you didn’t remember me once. I mean, it happened before, you’d get weird and wouldn’t recognize anyone, but that one time … Jesus, that time I thought maybe it was for good. That you were gone. I couldn’t take it when you didn’t know me. My whole chest was like ice. You looked right through me.” He sniffled a little, but he wasn’t crying. “Steve, is it selfish? That poor widow’s just lost her man and here I am moaning about someone who’s still alive, something that’s never really happened?”

 

“It’s not selfish,” Steve said numbly, but he was shaken. He hadn’t known any of that. “You did what you could for her. It’s not.”

 

And Steve has been telling himself that ever since, but he gets it now. God, he gets it. For every second that he ever made Bucky feel this way, he wishes he could go back in time and put them both out of their misery, and then he’s horrified by that thought. It is horrible. It’s a terrible thing to think, so self-pitying and defeatist. No one needs to be put out of their misery. Bucky’s getting better.

 

And there’s always the chance that Bucky’s no longer burdened with those particular memories, which, in the scheme of things, is starting to sound like a blessing.

 

Which he also feels guilty about thinking.

 

He leans his forehead against the window, cool despite the slowly-dissipating evening heat, and counts to ten. Then he straightens up and rolls his shoulders back.

 

He calls Natasha and they schedule a time for him to come over and help her paint the walls of her new apartment. She’s thinking sky blue, just to be different.

* * *

 

Not all of Steve’s nightmares are about Bucky. In fact, at least half of them aren’t.

 

He feels a little strange about that, that Bucky doesn’t take up more room in his subconscious, that he doesn’t feel the need to drown himself in regret when he’s asleep the way he does when he’s awake and watching Bucky stare into space. (And he _knows_ that just because he looks empty inside when he does, doesn’t mean that he is; that just because Steve is desperate for a familiar reaction, a familiar gesture, doesn’t mean it’s Bucky’s responsibility to offer one to him. Bucky’s not empty. But he’s learned to hide his thoughts.)

 

But he’s also grateful, and he feels guilty for that, too.

 

Even he knows that that one’s a one-way ticket to not-okay. He tries to distract himself when the unwinnable guilt spiral clutches at him. He usually just ends up at Sam’s place trying to make dinner, taking out the garbage, fixing the sink. Sam can tell, he knows. He doesn’t really try to hide it.

 

“Gotta start somewhere,” Sam says while he looks down at Steve on his back under the sink. “When I met you, you were still trying to keep your force fields up.”

 

Steve snorts. It’s not funny, but everything sounds gentler when it’s Sam saying it. “The first step is admitting that you have a problem?”

 

“Nah, the first step is whatever gets your feet on the floor in the morning. Plant ‘em and you’re already closer to where you want to be. Never doubt that.” He crouches down on his haunches, elbows on his knees, and peers into the cabinet illuminated by the flashlight balanced next to Steve’s head. “But it helps when you stop plastering over the problem with fake smiles that make kittens curl up and cry.”

 

“Kittens don’t cry.”

 

“I’m gonna Tweet that. 'Captain America says kittens don’t cry. Also he eats bald eagles.’”

 

Steve points vaguely toward the toolbox. Sam rifles through it without looking and comes up with the wrench he’d needed. Steve has stopped specifying which one he’s looking for or even what size; Sam always knows which one he needs and he seems to do it by feel. He hasn’t looked once. As parlor tricks go, it’s a pretty good one.

 

There’s a steady, slow drip of stale water somewhere in the center of his chest, one or two drops a minute. He’d taken off his shirt before he climbed under, but it’s still tepid and unpleasant. He can’t figure out where the drip is coming from; Sam shut the water off an hour ago.

 

He maneuvers the flashlight around until he can see the source of the leaking.

 

“Oh,” he says. He pokes it a little with the handle of the wrench, mostly just to see what will happen, and a small torrent of foul water cascades through the brand new split in the weakened underside of the board, splashing back into his face.

 

He turns his head to spit out a mouthful. “Why is there a board under your sink instead of just, you know, sink?”

 

Sam laughs, handing him a towel. Now that the hidden pocket of accumulated runoff has burst, there’s no more water leaking on him, even though it’s left him soaked.

 

“The Seventies were a weird time in home construction, man. Better you than me.”

 

He wipes off his face and finishes fixing the sink. It’s sort of soothing and surreal at the same time how little plumbing has changed in all these years, even if the pipes he installs now are PVC.

 

He remembers the summer Bucky’s dad had taken it upon himself to hold a weekly seminar for his two sons and Steve on things that a man should know in the world. Steve remembers picking up a wrench and holding it wrong until Bucky’s dad gently corrected him, remembers throwing all of his weight into the torque and the grin that split his face when he fixed the pipes.

 

He can’t go home and tell Bucky, so he tells Sam, and Sam likes these stories, but he’s also got his own. Steve’s story is sweet, but the tale that Sam weaves about his one weekend excursion into the world of plumbing ends with his mother fixing the shower and Sam getting his wrist set.

 

“I have many talents,” he concludes. “Water, however, is not my sign.”

 

“You’re an air sign?”

 

“How’d you ever guess?” He offers Steve a hand and pulls him up. “Feel better, Superman?”

 

Steve rolls his eyes, but he does.

 

They talk more over dinner, which consists of grilled cheese sandwiches for the main course and peanut butter and jelly on crackers for dessert. It’s been a long day for them both. He goes home to find Bucky methodically working through a tall stack of books bearing author names that all end with a string of abbreviated letters, and after an awkward moment where he debates asking whether Bucky’s eaten or not – not wanting to be condescending or infantilize him, but also concerned because sometimes he still skips meals – he bites the bullet and asks anyway. Bucky slowly looks up, mind still processing something he’s read, and even more slowly points to the single washed dish in the drain board. It’s the shorthand signal he’s taken to leaving. Steve hasn’t asked whether it’s to assure Steve or to remind himself. Either way, the system seems to being helping.

 

“Oh. Sorry.” Steve scratches the back of his neck, shifting his weight. “Thanks for humoring me. Goodnight.”

 

Bucky nods, readjusts the book in his lap, and looks back down.

 

Steve changes and goes to sleep.

 

A mission had gone bad last week. A building that was supposed to be empty had gone up in flames only to turn out to be full of children huddled there, hiding from the violence and shouting. The heart-stopping, adrenaline-dripping moment in time when he’d frozen, horrified, just for a fraction of an instant, has been tripping him up all week, sneaking into his way and faltering his steps. He hears the splintering beams and shattering windows in his head, bangs and pops and crashes, and smells ash and smoke and his own sweat, sour with fear. He got most of the kids out without too many injuries, none that wouldn’t heal eventually, but he couldn’t reach the last one and had to rely on Stark to get her out, too far from where he could reach in time and pinned under a collapsed wall.

 

She’s resting comfortably in a local hospital. The nurses on staff have been texting him updates all week, since he put on his most Captainly face and lowered his eyes and said please.

 

He can see her, though, the way Stark carried her out in his arms, the ends of her hair singed and soot blackening her face, one ankle swollen and bruised, blood dripping down her sleeve. Natasha gently wiped her face and revealed brown skin made dull with fear and pain, eyes wide and glassy.

 

They almost hadn’t gotten to her.

 

Not every mission is like this, but how many stories just like it does he need to never get a good night’s sleep again?

 

Every time he finds himself thinking about her, he reads the texts on his phone, tells himself that it worked out, and thinks about how to incorporate what they learned into future missions.

 

The nurses text him that she’s been asking about him and that she likes ponies.

 

When he visits her, he brings ice cream and a rough cartoon of her and a pony sitting on a bench eating ice cream. This probably makes him the pony, and it’s not his greatest work, but she doesn’t care. She’s delighted.

 

He can’t stay long, but he feels ten pounds lighter after he leaves.

 

There’s a laundry list of nightmares waiting their turn to clasp their reaching hands 'round his sleeping throat, not all of which are set to the whoosh of a train and Bucky’s screams in his ears and the biting cold wind whipping his face, but some days he thinks he keeps them at bay just a little longer. Sometimes they keep their distance and he doesn’t dream at all.

* * *

 

Bucky watches him at the gym. It was a little strange at first on multiple levels. When they were growing up Bucky had been active and physical, always touching and always running around. He ran around less after he went to work and came home tired and grouchy with stories of rude customers and incompetent fellow employees, but he was still capable of near-instantaneous second winds while Steve was often summoning the energy to climb the stairs. It was an unacknowledged thing between them that Bucky never poked and Steve refused to be bothered by.

 

Later, when Steve had all the energy of a freshly-struck lightning rod and channeled as much of it as he could into learning the rigors of being a soldier that he'd missed on the chorus line, Bucky trained with him. It was an adjustment for sure, but he'd liked training together, seeing Bucky in action and matching him step for step. As far as this body knew, he'd always run circles around Bucky and done pushups with Buck's bare feet resting obnoxiously across his shoulders, just for the hell of it, just to be a smartass, face near planted into the dirt to hide his grin. It was a thing that they did together. It was a give and take.

 

Bucky doesn't participate now. He just watches, and Steve had grown accustomed to falling over while Bucky tagged in, and he'd grown accustomed to sharing this time together and competing good-naturedly, but he has a little trouble being the only one doing anything at all.

 

Bucky is a blur in motion in his mind. He shakes his head to clear it, telling himself that it's not fair, that he's made promises to God on down that he won't judge Bucky against himself. It's a reflex, though. He's just got to train himself out of the reflex.

 

And not think about the shit Bucky would have given him for that half-assed landing if the Bucky who'd seen it had been the ghost in his memories and not the living, breathing man staring at him with vague interest and softly blinking eyes, not moving much more than to stretch his legs out in front of him.

 

He smiles at him anyway. It's not like he's the man that Bucky would remember either.

 

Steve has been shaped by his life, too.

* * *

 

Bucky is gone.

  
  
Bucky is gone and Steve is by himself in the apartment. Sam is a phone call away. He's not working today. Steve knows that he'd come in a heartbeat.

 

He doesn't call right away. He wonders if Sam knew about how Bucky felt. If Sam knew that Steve was hurting him and didn't realize how much.

 

Sam did the right thing, if he did. Obviously he's kept Bucky's confidence. It's the right thing. Bucky's trust is important and not lightly given.

 

Bucky is gone, and Steve ... doesn't feel all that different. He sits motionless at the kitchen table where Bucky had said goodbye to him, watching the ceiling fan spin slowly. Bucky's confession has made the white noise in his head surge to the surface and break through, but he realizes that most of it was already there. Is still there, churning.

 

He should scream and cry and collapse, do something dramatic and demonstrative, but it turns out that he's already equipped for loneliness and heartbreak. He's intimately familiar with the pain and already knows how to withstand it. And he realizes now that, like Bucky claimed, this doesn't change things for him.

 

He's just been getting by for so long that he hadn't seen it. Hadn't let himself.

 

So Bucky is gone and Steve gets it. He hadn't really been here all along. What Steve had, the person he thought he'd had, was not Bucky. He was a lost soul wearing ill-fitting clothes, and Steve had tried his best, but they were never going to fit.

 

Maybe now he'll find what he's looking for.

 

Steve changes and goes out for a run.

 


End file.
